Mom befriends wife of PTSD vet charged with murder

Windy said the Army took Nick’s gun away the last time he was in Iraq, in 2008, after he cleared his barracks there, too. He was discharged because of PTSD in January.

Back in the states, she said, Nick sometimes attacked her in bed at night — as though she were an enemy — only to “wake up” or snap out of what seemed like a trance and not remember a thing.

That’s one reason she believed Nick when he told a court-appointed psychiatrist that he didn’t actually remember the shootings and robbery — though he has no reason to doubt them.

“I just remember I was Tasered, then I was riding in the back of the police car,” Horner told the doctor, though police say Horner told them he also remembered a female Subway worker handing him money.

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Windy said her husband talked about suicide, cried often, and hid a loaded weapon in the couch cushions when he’d watch TV. Nick Horner spent hours or days in the basement and had to be coaxed upstairs for meals or even to color Easter eggs with his children.

Months before his arrest, Windy recalled, a VA counselor told her to get used to having a broken husband.

“She told me, ’Your husband died in Iraq. You’re either going to have to deal with that or move on,”’ Windy said.

Since 2002, about half of the more than 1 million U.S. service members discharged from Middle East deployments have been screened for PTSD because they sought help at Department of Veterans Affairs facilities. About 134,000 showed signs of PTSD, making it the most common combat-related affliction, said VA spokeswoman Laurie Tranter.

Rising suicide rates prompted the VA to train workers nationwide to locate veterans in trouble with the law, even before the Army found a possible link in July between intense combat and 11 slayings attributed to 14 soldiers at Fort Carson, near Colorado Springs, Colo., between 2005 and 2008.

“Sometimes, our first indication, and the family’s first indication, that there’s a problem are these little brushes with the law — getting themselves into trouble, fights, those kinds of things,” said Jan Kemp, VA’s national suicide prevention coordinator.

But the prosecutor in Horner’s case, Blair County District Attorney Richard Consiglio, says 5 million Americans have PTSD and that “alone is not a defense to any crime.”

And in a statement, the families of the victims said his trial “should be an examination of the criminal actions of Nicholas Horner and not a referendum on the military’s handling of our country’s soldiers.”

Windy Horner and Laurie Claar actually have little in common.

Claar, a mother of four, spends her days watching her grandchildren or picking up a few extra dollars cleaning houses. Horner, a nurse at a drug treatment center, has been married less than three years. She and Nick were wed on a Florida beach on St. Patrick’s Day, 2007; though childless, she was helping Nick raise his two children from his first marriage when he was arrested.

The Claars are active in a support group at the Veterans Administration hospital in Altoona and want the military to better train veterans to re-enter society. Laurie tells anyone who asks that the military needs to help veterans adjust better to civilian life.

“When you go to basic training, they train you for what they want you to be in a war situation,” Claar said. “Why can’t they take a couple of months to retrain them to go back to society?”

“I knew Nick would have to fight for his life while he was deployed, but I never thought he’d have to fight for his life on U.S. soil,” Windy said. “He’s just a kid that needs help.”

But she also needs help, and the Claars are there for her.

“I was just amazed that someone would be behind us that wasn’t, like, family,” Windy said. With the Claars nearby, she can “vent and freak out and have somebody like Laurie and Autumn come to Nick’s court hearings with me.”

Windy texts or calls Autumn daily. Nick is now pen pals with Autumn’s 11-year-old daughter, Hailee; the day Windy met the Claars, he spoke with Laurie on the phone.

“I think I could connect to Nick because I was thinking about my own son: What if the tables were turned? What if that were him in jail?” Laurie Claar said.

She does not pretend to have any great insight into the crimes Nick Horner is accused of committing, or what to do about them.

“I just think of him as a young person with an issue that he didn’t necessarily ask for,” Claar said. “Nick and Matt, they served their country, and they didn’t ask for the situations that they got into.”